SPEAKER_01 0:00

I call it weaponizing competence and it's the ability of having absolutely no clue but still going ahead with the plan. My dad is an entrepreneur. Growing up I never saw him. And I actually promised to myself that I would never be an entrepreneur. Ten years later, look at me. Exactly the same.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

When did you have that switch from like, I don't want to be an entrepreneur to okay, I'm gonna do this shit?

SPEAKER_01 0:20

When I had no other option, I literally applied to hundreds and hundreds of applications just putting it in. I was gonna give up. But then I found LinkedIn. LinkedIn right now is going through a Facebook 2015 moment for the second time, and people are not paying attention.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

I agree that LinkedIn is the single best platform that an agency ever could be on to get clients. Do you think it's really important that you have virality early or quick momentum?

SPEAKER_01 0:42

So I believe in this thing called.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

How does someone figure out what to talk about when they don't think they've got any value they can provide to the world?

SPEAKER_01 0:50

You become your own best case study. A lot of free work at the start with the testimonials. That's how I made my first $10,000 just by getting one client for free at the start.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

You've grown an audience of over $360k. What do you think your secret is?

SPEAKER_01 1:01

The reason why most people won't reach the size of my audience is because. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

So you've grown an audience of over 360k across various platforms, might be more than that now, over the past few years. What do you think your secret is to that growth?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

I call it weaponized incompetence, and it's uh the ability of having absolutely no clue of what you're doing, but still going ahead with the plan. When I first started, I had no idea what the agency world was or what LinkedIn even was or what the goal was. I just knew there was something to chase, and I just went ahead and did it. And that same value I've pursued and used and utilized to my advantage this entire time. Weaponized incompetence is the single reason why I'm sitting next to you right now. Like me doing the thing, no matter whether I felt it was correct or not, got me to where I am. Too many people overcomplicate the entire process of growing a following, growing a business, growing a personal brand. But personally, just do the thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Interesting. So what would you say then the thing is that 95% of people get wrong because most people will never reach your size of audience?

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Okay, that's your question. So, well, the reason why most people won't reach the size of my audience is because they forget that in order to grow a loyal audience as well, with high engagement and high rapid growth rates, you need to be an interesting person. You need to have something interesting to say. This idea of building a personal brand is so well and nice, and I it is my entire business. Like if you build a parcel brand, it will change your life. Caveat, you need to have some personality within that personal brand. You have it. You have the expertise, you have the talent, you have the charisma. Same with people like Iman, same with people like other people like Sav Ovens, he may not be the most charismatic, but he's the most intelligent, right? And that is also a type of charisma. If you look at Elon Musk, he's got charisma in a nerdy way. He just overshares his thoughts, and that is amusing and appealing to someone. But the reality is, if you're just posting content five times a week on LinkedIn, like Gary V says, or just push volume, volume, volume. Right now, it is not going to happen anymore because the market has sophisticated to the point where the volume push of the typical educational value uh load and bullshit I see online is no longer enough. We have ChatGPT. If I go to ChatGPT and I ask it how to build an AI agent in eight steps, it will give me the exact same answer that someone three years ago would have given and that would have gone viral. Today it's just like it's just there. You know, we're not oversaturated of oversaturation of information. So the only thing that will make you stand out is you and what you have to give beyond what you can educate on. Like it is your personality, your own for advantages in life. So your knowledge, your skill sets, your individual experiences, right? That is what people miss.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

And I I don't want to get ahead because I want to unpack that. I want to I want to like try and framework that somewhat and you probably already have. But I'm interested to know from your perspective whether or not we're talking about truly just diving in headfirst and trying to be ourselves or actually trying to orchestrate our brand before we even go ahead to create it. Um and I want to hold that thought just to plant that seed, because I just want to backtrack a little bit before we get into it because I want to d unpack the whole personal brand piece. But you moved from Mexico to the UK at 15 years old. Um what was that transition like for you? And how did you then get exposed to business from an early age?

SPEAKER_01 4:51

So I moved from Mexico uh 15, like you said, and you were saying something before this podcast, and it's like you're a chameleon. The vast entrepreneurs have this chameleon effect that you're able to adapt to any situation that you're in. And I think that is what's got me to where I am. Being able to quickly understand the room, read it, and then understand who is who in that exact scenario, and how can you take advantage of the things that you have in front of you? Most people struggle thinking, oh, I don't have enough resources, I don't have enough knowledge. The knowledge is in front of you, you just need to look for it. Like you need to activate that RAS reticular activation system. Whereas if you see a red car, you're gonna start seeing red cars everywhere. So, how can you start finding little nuggets of information that can get you ahead in life? So that was how I've sort of managed to blend in into British culture at 15 without sort of like standing out like a sole thumb. I just blend it in and it made me who I am today. Uh what was the second question? What was my first?

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Well, how did you then get exposed to business from that?

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Like, well, it wasn't anything. My dad is an entrepreneur. So he's always he was an executive beforehand. Uh growing up, I never saw him. Uh he's a workaholic. I grew up technically without seeing him. Um only until recently I see him more much more. My dad was addicted to work. And I actually promised to myself that I would never be an entrepreneur. I hated seeing someone so addicted to typing in their laptop at all times. Like, who does that? Who who stays online for 12 hours every single day? Like, who in the right minds? When you have you can have the safety of a job, a good salary, a nine to five, and then go on holiday whenever you want? Absolutely not. So I made a promise I will never be an entrepreneur because of my dad. Ten years later, look at me, exactly the same. So my dad influenced me to the point where even when I'm walking in the streets of London, he was like, when I was in London, when I was your age, I saw you in this street where you took a photo, and it's incredible. My dad is a pro manifestor. He's like law of attraction king. But he was my first exposure to business.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

What happened then that made you change your mind? Like why why when did you have that switch from like I don't want to be an entrepreneur to okay, I'm gonna do this shit and actually do it really fucking well?

SPEAKER_01 7:02

When I had no other option.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

I could not get a job to save my life. Like I literally applied to hundreds and hundreds of roles, sent hundreds and hundreds of applications. Just couldn't get in. Mostly, maybe I didn't have the 20 years of experience that I was expected to have after university. Mind you, I have a master's degree. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna get this golden ticket. Also, I'm I'm an immigrant and I'm Mexican. So the golden ticket was this master's degree that society promises you that if you have, you will get the life that you are dreaming of. You will get the dream job, you will get all of these things. Surprise, I did not. That was not my golden ticket. My golden ticket was my ability to take action on things and move quickly. And that led me to entrepreneurship because I had no other option. Like, what was I gonna do? Um, go into an entry-level job that was going to make me even more depressed than where I was in 2022. So, long story short, um, I was diving into the internet, I was looking for like ways to get experience. Like, I wanted good experience so I could put it in my CV so I could get a reference, and then I could get into the university that I wanted to or a role, right? And so I started SMMA, so started with uh Imangajifano, um, you know, went into his course, like took a whatever, uh, didn't do well because SMMA at the time was like Facebook ads. I don't, I don't even know, I didn't have any money to spend on ads. Let's start there. So by the time I had invested in the course and then invested in my face first first ads, I I was already broke. Like I had no more no more money. Then I started different business models and I tried them out. I hated them all. Um, so I was gonna give up. But then I found LinkedIn. And that single thing changed my life because the one post that I made there radically changed my perception of what the potential and opportunity is for someone that is delivering value and solving one single problem online. Because after I posted my first post and it went crazy viral, 4,000 likes, uh 300,000 impressions in 42 hours, got inbound leads for a product or a service that I didn't even have. If I could do that, then what could the future have for me? And why was I boxing myself into trying to be the perfect candidate for a role I didn't want?

SPEAKER_00 9:18

I love that. Your first post as well. That's pretty cool. I didn't know that. What do you then do with that? Like not having a depth of business experience yet. You've got all of this opportunity. Did you make some mistakes early on, or was it quite a straight path to you started an agency vote initially, didn't you?

SPEAKER_01 9:35

I made all the mistakes. I I I cringe at looking at me before. Um so with SMMA, I failed because I didn't know how to do run Facebook ads for my first business in the pandemic. I was like, oh, uh no one's doing this. I'm gonna sell a drop shipping store and I'm gonna sell hand sanitizer. No one's doing this. You know, blue ocean. Obviously didn't work. I didn't even know like the entire economics of how these businesses ran. The course seller that sold me the course because I bought a few was like, yeah, it's free money. No, it's not. He doesn't tell you that you need to pay for the ads and you need to talk to these people from Alibaba. Like, I was just a girl in my house, like trying to make internet money. That didn't work. So failed that, uh, very strong realization that maybe I don't have it. Maybe I'm a failure, maybe I'm just a failure at everything. Because at that point, couldn't get a job, was civilian employed, severely depressed. Felt I was overweight as well. So I was like the full package of like, I hate my life. I am so sorry, mom and dad, for disappointing you. I I apologize. Um so then failed that. I was like, okay, let me try it again. Drop shipping failed, Facebook ads failed, Etsy start failed, um, tried again with SMMA, a different model, uh, influencer marketing. Got some clients there, hated them all. I was like, you're paying me $300 to run your entire Instagram and you're complaining that you're not getting leads. It wasn't me, it was you. It was your product. I was just here for the vibes. So I was just getting experience. So I think because I didn't have this crazy dream of being an entrepreneur and like Bugattis and Ferraris and the lifestyle. I just wanted some experience to put in the CV. Like I didn't care about this long-term vision of scaling and being the person that I am today. And I think that's why I was able to get to where I am today so fast. Because there was no goalpost. I was just figuring it out as I went and it worked. And then obviously, um I bumped into a Gary V video. It was a keynote speech from 2019, I'll remember so clearly. He was shouting at people, he's like, if you don't get onto LinkedIn right now, you're losers. Like, you didn't listen to me about TikTok. Look what happened. Now get into LinkedIn because the easiest platform right now. I was like, okay, fine, like I'll listen to you when then. Um my first post went viral, but I what I value mention often, because I forget, um I engineered that. It didn't happen just by luck. I manufactured luck as a result of me having had all of that experience and that exposure to what dopamine looked like to a B2B audience. So I was talking, I was working with all the people. So I knew what made them tech. I understood what they wanted to listen, and what I saw on LinkedIn was a gap. There was a big, massive gap between authentic content for our lack of a better word, and educational content and entertaining content. So realized, okay, so these posts are going viral right now. These posts suck. Let me combine both and see what happens. Posted it, engineered my own luck, went viral by accident.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Do you think and I'm I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit now, but uh I just really keen to know your perspective on this. Do you think that it's really important that you have virality early or quick momentum and maintain that momentum in a brand? Or do you think you can gain significant momentum if you've already been going for a decent amount of time already? Because you hit the market, bang, seemingly instant hit. I presume your content continue doing well thereafter and gain momentum. No? Had lows? What's your perspective on that?

SPEAKER_01 13:19

So I believe in this thing called the winning effect. The winning effect essentially means that when you have a small win that is of an a decent incremental value that you haven't had before, you're more likely to keep on doing the thing because you've already seen what it feels like to win. So you're gonna do it again and again and again, even if those next few tries aren't as high as the first one. So I absolutely stand by that value. If I I am pretty certain that if I hadn't gone viral within the first month of me being on LinkedIn, I don't think I would have kept on going. And I see it with every single one of my clients. We try and engineer that luck and manufacture that virality so they believe in the process. Because most people don't believe either in themselves or in the product or in the service or in the platform, right? So we need to give them that in order to make them feel safe, make them feel seen, and make them seal make them feel heard, right? When you posted your first LinkedIn post uh when we met in Bali again after I roasted you for a second. Yeah. Um you had that initial spike in okay, you I posted a different format, and it kind of worked, right? So you kind of were motivated to keep on going. And then, you know, if you you keep on going because you know that it works, you have proof of concept. Now it's on you to keep that proof and iterate on that concept.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

I was just salty that it wasn't Lara level spike.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

I mean, could have been.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Like a couple of hundred views. Like, come on, guys.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

I mean, you got like 300 likes in like Yeah, like 90% of them were your followers. So Yeah, but that that's what it takes. Like sometimes it takes that engineering of like I'm tapping into a new market in order to then create my own again. Because what happens with people like you, and I see it all the time with I I worked a lot with um very successful multimillionaires in other industries that have a lot of presence in their industry. And they're like, people already know me. Like, why do I need to play this game again? Uh and it's this frustration of having to go back down to level zero where you're like fast telling people who you are, because you're not no one's used to that in anyways, like not you, not me. Even on Instagram, I'm s I'm experiencing that. Like, why do I have to reintroduce my like I shouldn't do that? I already did that. So, you know, but it's important, especially when you can't attach yourself to someone else that already has it. You're playing the game in on easy mode. With me, you had it on easy mode, where it's like we have very similar audiences, and then all you have to do is borrow it for a second and then keep on going, and then manufacture your own authority on the platform through me, and then you become you. And the reason why I say it is because that's what I did, and it worked for a period of time. I was attaching my name to this guy called Justin Welsh, this other guy called Mal Parker, this other guy called I don't know who else, that's it. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna try and put myself in that circle, enter it, and then create my own. And I did. But it takes a certain amount of I guess not even consistency, just need. And I had that need because I had nothing else going on for me. And I think it's easier when you don't have that insane like I need this to work, right? You don't have it because you have YouTube, you have Instagram, you have email, like you have so many other multiple sources of income streams and revenue and and disability that LinkedIn is not the be all end all. But for me it was because I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Many people come from the side, but they've already they have the business, and then they like, oh shit, I should do the personal brand thing, and like your personal brand created the success. Can you talk a bit about that early success? Like you started the agency, and then I know you had a you build a consulting offer as well, had a hundredk launch for that as well. Um so what was the the early monetary success like from that? So you've taken the audience, you're like, okay, I need to create a business out of this. What did that look like and how's that kind of evolved now?

SPEAKER_01 17:19

So the agency happened by accident. Like I had my first inbound lead as soon as I created that first LinkedIn post. I was just like a glamorized freelancer. And then I realized, okay, people are actually willing to pay money. Okay, so then I realized that people don't take freelancers seriously. It's like a word that people don't like. So I was like, I'm gonna say I'm an agency. So I started the agency module and you know started optimizing for CIM, all of these crazy things that you do with the agency. And then I scaled it to 10K, no, to 10 clients, um, which was amazing on my own, using AI as well. When it first came out, no one really knew what it was. ChatGPT was like baby BGPT, like nothing we've seen right now. And I managed to scale that, and I was like, this is not for me, I hate this. Like, and again, everybody was trying to brainwash me on the idea, like, why don't you just scale and hire? I don't know how to hire, and also I don't want to. And then I realized, and um it came to a breaking point because at that time I was doing my master's degree, right? And it was it was a full-time master's degree that I had to get because of my family. Yeah, being an immigrant is like I don't care if you have a multi-million dollar business, if you don't have a degree, you're nothing, right? The degree has way more value than a mil like a million-dollar business back in Mexico, by the way. I don't know why. It's just like societal cues, etc. So it's like I called one of my mentors up. I was like breaking, like it was breaking down, burning out. I didn't know what I was doing, obviously. Like no one taught me anything. I was teach like learning as I go, as I went. And he was like, Lara, you don't have to quit the agency and you don't have to drop out of university, you have a third door. And I'm like, What? And he's like, if I had the leverage that you have right now with your audience, I would be consulting and stop trade trading time for money. And I was like, Oh, okay. So then stopped the agency, still had the I still have some of the clients, by the way, uh, as consulting clients, where we go through it and it's like more sort of like don't with you type of approach. Moved on to cohort-based models. Because everybody told me to make a course. But I again, baby entrepreneur, who the fuck am I to create a course? Like, what the fuck? Like, no. Um, I also love courses, I've taken every single one of them. I I I attribute course culture to where who I am today because they were like so accessible, so so easy to understand, and it they taught me so much. And to me, creating a course was like, me? A course never. Like, no, who no, like I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just figuring it out. So it didn't make sense. But then with cohort, I was like, I can teach this live, still make some money, and then validate this product that was gonna make create a cause. Because imagine if I spent the three months creating a cause that no one's gonna buy, then what a waste of my time, right? And I was fearful of that, obviously. Like people think that I don't have impulse syndrome or fee, I do. I just don't show up, or I just take action in it in a different way. Like I don't I don't let it consume me. I just okay, cool. I've got fear, that's good. Like what else what else? What's next? So then the cool court actually ended up making eighty thousand dollars within my first four days. Mind you, I was still at university. $80,000 as a recent, almost recent graduate. Like, okay, flex. All organic. No, why are you laughing? What?

SPEAKER_00 20:25

Just the flex.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Just flex. Shout out to the teacher that told me I couldn't do it. Hope he's watching that. Um, anyway, so that's what happened. And I was like, okay, I've got validation of the product, I've made income, I've actually promoted myself for once. Because by the way, I never promoted the agency once. Like no one actually knew. People knew that I had an agency, but I never promoted it. Why? Because I didn't have the ability to fulfill the volume that I would get if I was promoting the agency. Because everybody wanted to work with me at the time because I was like this viral growth hacker that just by chance managed to grow from zero to 50,000 to 100,000 in months, right? So people wanted me to do that for them. Unfortunately, I only have 24 hours in a day. Um, and I was already dying. So I was like, no, I'm not, I can't promote this. Also, I had this issue and um random tangent, but a lot of men were hopping on calls with me, not to buy from me, but just to talk to me. And I was like, you know what? No, no. So I just like stepped out of that, like kept it lean, small, don't care, don't want to scale it. I just want to get my degree. This is really cool experience. Again, maybe I can get a job after. The cohort model changed my my entire view of money. And the entire my entire view on how I could generate money while still being in the trenches. Because I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like you still need to be a practitioner of the of the art in order to teach it. And this is what I see with a lot of courses. Like if you buy an agency course from six years ago, it's not the same. It's the same with LinkedIn, especially when the algorithms are involved. So I felt like a duty, like a civic duty to the LinkedIn police and myself to be like, I need to be involved every single day in order to deliver what they need. Because imagine if I told them, oh yeah, you can still post three times a week with a carousel and you go viral. No, that's not true anymore. But I wouldn't know that. So that is the cohort experience. And then we productize it into our course and then we've had multiple uh six-figure launches after.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Nice. That's awesome. Congrats. And I know you're now kind of moving into the the SAS world with that as well. SAS lay. Yeah, which maybe we can jump into later on. But let's jump, let's get nitty on personal brand, because I think personal brand is I mean, you know I'm I wouldn't be sit sat where I am with awesome for my personal brand. Like same thing as you. I've started an agency, sure, but I wouldn't had have had the opportunities that I've had in business anywhere close being able to open the doors. And so I'm a huge advocate for such, and I think we see many people preach about how important personal brand is and how we should do that. But in a practical sense, like for agencies that are watching this right now, the biggest objection I get when I'm speaking to agencies saying you need to get behind a founder-led brand and you need to you need to really lean into this is, well, I just don't know what to talk about. I just don't know what to share, I don't know like what I'm gonna create content on, my life isn't that interesting. I'm presuming these are the objections that you get from people when they come to you. And how do you combat that? How do you does someone begin to even think about what they can talk about and what they can share?

SPEAKER_01 23:32

You start instead of trying to put yourself into the I need to become an influencer, just think about it, I need to become a person of influence. And that is the key unlock that we that I have with clients in the B2B industry where they're they don't they cringe. The reason why most people aren't creating content on LinkedIn and building a personal brand is not because they all of these limiting beliefs, I don't have anything to talk about, I don't know. It's more so they're afraid that they're going to be seen as less off and back to I'm a content creator, no, you're an entrepreneur. Okay. So instead of trying to create content that storytells, that does this whole thing like all the personal brands do, how can you be useful to the market right now? And this is why I'm so strongly set on LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn, out of all different platforms, has the largest percentage of decision makers on any social media platform. It also has the most interesting debates when it comes to business, especially B2B, also B2C. And so when you look at it like that, if you are someone that maybe maybe you're not interested at all, maybe maybe you have no personality, but your business does have something. You've done something cool. Maybe it's not multi-million dollar, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're helping one person. And if you focus on that one person that you can help with one piece of advice every single day, and you're being useful to the market, the market will thank you and then tell you what to post next. I always tell, I always tell my clients, so many people, and you have no idea, and you probably have this all the time. A lot of people think they have a business, they don't even have an offer. And it's a problem. Like the amount of very successful entrepreneurs that are still not sure about what they are even selling, it's insane. Some people have an agency, but they also want to be an author, they want to write a biography, they want to start B2B SaaS, okay? And I'm like, fastly, you need to define what is the one thing that you want to be known for, right? It is not the one thing that is gonna make you super famous, like um Stephen Bartlett or uh Alex Romosi, which are like cool people, charismatic, very good speakers. Like it's not that. Even they started being really good at one thing Alex Ramosy, sales, Stephen Bartlett, agency, uh, me, ghostwriting, you, agency. Like it's not now they see us and it's like, oh, they've got this, they've got that, travel, mastermind, etc. But when you zoom out and zoom in into the one thing, the one thing is the skill that you're able to tell people that you can do and you can help them. So educational content by far is the thing that will get you to where you want to be when it comes to parcel run, especially on LinkedIn. And it's so easy. Even right now, um, right before we came, I came to this podcast because I wanted to be prepared, um, I called the team because we're building a B2B agency with LinkedIn ads, and we ran analysis on the last 100 posts that are doing incredibly well and that are producing the highest amount of followers right now in 2025. It is not viral content that feels like slop. I know you. Whenever you go on LinkedIn, you open it and you're like, ugh, this is slop, this is cringe, I don't care about the TED Talks, I don't care about the infographics, I don't care about your ugly selfie, like I don't care about this girl that looked really, really hot and somehow got viral because of her hug. It's not her hook, it's her photo. Like, let's let's be honest. It's the same with other people, like it's the same thing. So the content that is actually producing the highest results right now is thought leadership content. Things that are honestly honest thoughts. Because people on LinkedIn are bored of the AI slot that ChatGPT is creating, because everybody now has a ChatGPT bot that is creating perfectly viral content. No. And everybody's also following these frameworks that all the big influences, like even myself, have done that work for us because we have the market share, but they don't. So the people that are smallest are standing out, just having a quick little rant about the agency world. There's this guy called Adam Robinson. I don't know if you heard of him. He's an agency guy, B2B, he sold his agency for like multi-7 figures as well. He talks about it very freely. He talks about the numbers, he talks about the AR, MR, all of these things. People love it. He goes about nearly every single time. There's no formatting, there's no crazy hug, there's no, you know, crazy promise, no crazy transformation, it's just the thought. And that is what LinkedIn wants right now, because it has got gone board of this algorithmic hacking that the platform has become and has come to, which is fine. Like, you know, when you see something you have to optimize on, I did it. But right now, like I think that when I see agency owners and any single person that has a business not taking advantage of LinkedIn, I'm like, what are you doing? You've got a free pass to building this personal brand that you're trying to spend thousands and thousands and thousands on agencies creating the most viral Imangaji style video and like the vlogs and all these things and multi-platform, like three different blog channels. You can just do it on LinkedIn in literally a month if you actually went ahead and did it. But I think the cringiness of it and the I think is the novelty really stops people and the fear of I need to be the most interesting person in the room. No, you just need to be the most useful.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

And sometimes to be the most useful, you only need to be a couple of steps further ahead than the other people in that room. I think I completely agree, of course, with value being the single most important thing, but I also have been reflecting quite a lot recently on how two people can say provide the same value, but those two people will be listened to in completely different ways. One person will have their information dismissed, the other person will have it worshipped because of who they are, and the value might be the same, but the way that they have um or the way they're perceived has a big difference on that. And so you mentioned early on about how important it is that you have charisma, that you have personality, and so on. How much of an influence do you think, and how important do you think it is to really think about who your character actually is? Because in a way, like whilst our personal brands we want them to be, you know, authentic and yeah, and everyone talks about authenticity, authenticity and just be yourself, and and and and I would like to believe that that my personal brand is a reflection of who I am, but realistically, I'm not sitting around talking every day about how to cold call, you know, I'm not sitting around like dreaming about cold emails, it's what I talk about to the audience and it reflects well with them. So, how important do you think it is to A just be who you are and provide the value, or Brap that value with some kind of mystique or brand or personality or some kind of character that you're essentially creating? Because the best brands have someone very individual behind them. Like Hormosy's got his nuances. You have you you have Slay. Slay. You have your eyes, you have and I don't know what the fuck I've got, but everyone's got something. And maybe my audience would be able to tell me that. Is that orchestrated?

SPEAKER_01 30:26

Relatable.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

Relatable thing.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

And you're like very relatable. Very like straight to the point.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Straight to the point. I'm Dorite, no bullshit. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 30:33

Yeah, no bullshit. I think that's what you're known for. Like you can you're real. Like every time I I grew up watching you, I don't know if you know that. Like, are you an Iman? I was like, oh my gosh, cool. And so it's it was that. You're very straight to the point, no, no crazy fellow words, you're like, this is what it takes, take it or leave it, you know. And I think people resonate with that, but other people would resonate more with like Iman's hyper-editic approach that he used to use, right? Um personally, I think the idea of being yourself is the biggest scam we've been sold by you know, more than propaganda in this industry. Being yourself, this is why artists are broke. It's the curse of a starving artist. If my art is good, then he must be seen. Lie. You know, most of like the big artists, um, arts became famous after they died and they made zero money from it, you know. And so this idea of authenticity and like I want to be myself and I must be seen for who I am, okay, then stay broke. Pure fact. I think that you can still remain yourself while still engineering the best spots, and that is parcel branding. Parcel branding is manufacturing fame and manufacturing authority at scale, you know? And if you are aware of what that cues look like for you and what those traits that you currently have can be maximized to the to the top where you can overemphasize on your strengths and on the utilized your like weaknesses, you're good. You do have to create a fake persona. It's called the alter ego effect. People like Kobe Bryant talk about it all the time. They create the blank bamba. You need an alter ego for your personal brand to succeed. You need this thing that makes you the most interesting, relevant, authoritative, um, charismatic person, whatever you want to, whatever you choose, and whatever also the cause that you're dealt with, you you just double down on that, right? For me, I'll just say I had no charisma. I used to have a stutter, I didn't know how to speak in public. English is not my first language. Uh I'm Mexican. I had every single, every single disadvantage going for me. Did I care? No. Why? Because I knew I could do if someone dumber than me was making more money than me and I had all this talent and knowledge and expertise, then why not? Oh, but I want to be myself and I want to write like a girl. And I'm like, hey, hey, queens and queens. Uh today we're gonna talk about marketing. Fucking no. Like, who is gonna take me seriously? And I think for me, I took this way more seriously because I'm a woman in business. I've got a bit harder when it comes to setting setting myself into the the the table. Like there's a little bit more things that I need to do in order to gain that authority. So what I did, okay, you analyze the people who are winning in the market. What are they doing right? Okay, you analyze yourself. Okay, what is a single scale that I can provide to the value to the to the market that can't give value immediately? Okay, and then over time you start engineering and you start listening to the market. Again, the market will tell you what it wants from you. The only input you need to give it is the content. It's like a machine, you know? It's psychology at scale. You're testing it as you go. And I think this is why social media is so incredible because it is the only place where you get immediate results and immediate iteration and immediate logic and immediate feedback loops where you can see, okay, if I post about copywriting, are people resonating with me? No. If I post about storytelling, are people resonating with me? Yes. If people are if I if I'm posting about uh generating leads leads on LinkedIn, yes. Okay, so I'm gonna cut the copywriting, I'm gonna keep these two things, and I'm gonna double down on that. But the reason why people stop and or they well they don't they don't even start, they overcomplicate the why or the how instead of doing the do. You know, you just need to try things and then figure it out after. And again, because I had nothing to lose and everything to win, I just kept on trying things and throwing stuff at our wall and things stuck ultimately.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

Do you think then by default through doing something for a number of years, because you can tell by the way I spoke then when I said, I don't know what I've got. I've the detachment between the character and me, they're they're symbiotic now. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. It's the same person. I don't make the conscious effort to be a certain person on social. I just can't be asked. But once upon a time I did care about that. It was it was something that I thought deeply about. So do you think that you become the brand?

SPEAKER_01 34:48

100%.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

I think the ultra-ego effect is essentially your higher self and who you want to become. And I think personal branding is the biggest art and way of becoming the person you want to be faster. Because you are practicing that person every single day. And so it you it doesn't have you don't you become that person as a result of you showing up as that person every single day. Uh for me, I always say that writing is the single most life-changing thing that you can do for yourself because when you write about your thoughts, you stop being you stop letting people tell you who you who who you are and you start discovering who you actually are. And you understand your thoughts and you understand how you why you think the way you think rather than why you should think the way you think. And so with personal branding, you're you're talking at scale, and then you're testing those thoughts out. And ultimately, yes, maybe you are educating on something very boring, but then that education then leads you to understand how to say even better, which makes you understand yourself better. And as a process, you become that person that you once faked to be. Now you are it.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

That's a really beautiful way to look at it. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

And that in itself should be enough of a motivator for people to start a brand because it's just making the commitment to the world or putting it out there that this is who I want to be and this is who I'm going to become. I was it was only yesterday I was looking at a video of myself that I put on my story and I was like, this person, this human, versus the person who started my YouTube channel, you compare those two people, I speak differently, I look differently, I act differently every single week. I'm a different, completely different person. And that person ha was engineered over a long enough period of time. And that in itself is just such a that's a big enough reason, if any, for getting business, for getting money to start a brand. Because you are p publicly declaring who you are. And I think that's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

How did you find your purpose? You don't find it, you manufacture it. And then the the the purpose is assigned to you once you get in the trenches of understanding who you even are. And you don't know that at the start. Like I I did you know where you you were gonna be 10 years ago? Probably not. It just happened. But you found the thing that made you tech, you know, agency world business, meeting new people. And when you start a personal brand, you get access to things that the normal world would never be able to provide to you, like the network, the people, the the education, the resources. I don't think I'd have half of my friends today if I didn't start posting on LinkedIn. And they made me a better person. And that's a default, I became a better entrepreneur entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is literally the pursuit of purpose and success. And ultimately it makes you a better person. And it's I I genuinely think that if I didn't become an entrepreneur, I think I'd still be depressed.

SPEAKER_00 37:48

Agree. And in debt. Tangibly someone knows what they they can talk about. Someone's got, let's say, a hypothetical person, John. John owns an ad agency. John knows a lot about ads, he hates sales. John starts talking about ads on social. He knows he can talk about ads. Where does John how does John then decide who John is going to be? Is there, you know, are we picking free character traits? Are we do we are we are we deciding okay we want to model upon this person? Because I think the risk is that people, and this is a trap that I fell into very early stages, is they try and replicate other brands that they see out there. Oh, I really want to be the ads guy, but I want to be like hormosy if he was an ads guy. And then because it's so detached from who they actually are at the moment, they struggle to do that. So I feel like whilst we can engineer and make the commitment to become a certain person, there has it has to be close enough to us to not be something that we can't maintain. So how do you find that people can decide who they want to be?

SPEAKER_01 39:00

I asked them, do you want fame or do you want fortune? Pick one. Most people say they want both, but they won't want. So when it comes to manufacturing fame or authority on LinkedIn and building the biggest baseline, you need to choose what are you why are you doing this? Like, do you want to become famous and have the virality, or do you want to have a lot of cash in the bank, right? And then that would determine what persona you then take. Because people that try the hormose effect, right? It is virality, it is flashy, it is hyper-edited, the same with Iman, the same with even me, right? And that creates a lot of virality. I don't have as much pipeline as people would expect me to have because I'm not optimizing for that. But if I did, I probably would. And then I have people, like there's two types of people in personal branding. There's the the educators and then the storytellers, right? You need to pick one to start so you can nail that one and then become the next one, right? I started with storytelling because I have no no no I didn't know anything. So it's like I already had my stories because I had a pretty decent crazy background where I was like, I'm doing a master's, I'm building a business, I don't know what I'm doing. So I, as I default, had the strength in storytelling. Most people are really good educators. And I think the arts guy should focus on full on on educating. And he sh most people, when they're trying to build the Pascal brand, they should do two things. They should follow the full 321 method and the content trifecta. The full 321 method is basically four posts a week, every single week. Three content pillars or three content themes. So this is storytelling, educating, and leads, lead magnets. The two is for the two different types of ICPs and the two different types of people that you're going to be addressing in the market. Most people think that you only need one ICP. And this is where they go wrong when it comes to building the personal brand. You need two: your ICP, your ideal customer, and your ideal follower. The ideal follower is gonna get you closer to your ideal customer. But people often neglect that because they're so obsessed with this idea of over-optimization for lead generation that they forget that social media is a game and you need to play it right. And you need these little followers from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, all of these places that people seem to not want followers from. These followers are the people that are gonna validate your ideal client that you are legit. So you need them. So anyone that doesn't like them, just you need them. You need them. Um and I have this all the time, like, because on LinkedIn you can see profile views. And people hate when it's like, oh, I've I'm getting too many Indians and Nigerians. I'm like, yeah, that's validation that your content is being promoted to a wider audience. When you came to me, you were like, oh, I've got no impressions. Now that you've got impressions, like, oh, they're from the wrong country, okay. Wait, we'll wait for it. Okay, anyways, it's tangent rants we can go into that after.

SPEAKER_02 41:45

So true, though.

SPEAKER_01 41:46

Yeah. And then the one is you need one call to action every single week. And then you need you need one call to action. Um, so either that's a sales post or you need one lead magnet. Lead magnets right now on LinkedIn are printing cash for every single one of our customers. They're the most easiest. And like lead magnets are my are my baby. Like, I'm obsessed with them. Like, every single time I post one, I get between 1,000 to 5,000 new email subscribers. I know you guys and any people, any person doing that, you guys are paying thousands for that. I get them for free. Just because I decided to not be authentic and just do the thing. I don't look at the cringe on LinkedIn. I don't care. If I care, I just let it go and I just do my job. And guess what? I get 5,000 new followers on newsletter that I can then convert to clients, right? So I think that if you follow that sequence for at least three months, you're gonna see a rapid increment in your followers, and if not in your business, right? And then the second thing, the content drive factor. You need three different types of content. Uh total addressable content, which is addresses the entire market, then growth content, and then authority content. Total addressable content is the type of content that you create about leadership. So you're a leader, obviously, you're an entrepreneur, you can be categorized as a leader. You also work remotely, right? That is total addressable market content because everybody can relate to that. So you're reaching the top. That's almost like top of photo. Growth content. Growth content is when you talk about a story that is going to make you relatable, and that's what's gonna buy make people buy into you. So then you've got two. Then the other type of content, authority-led content. Jordan's saying that you just invested in this new B2B AI SaaS and how much is valued at, and then you take a photo of it. Amazing. Increasing impressions. I just did one with my new investment in New Sonic. Uh, it got like 200,000 impressions, when my average right now is like around 100. So that those three reach as many people as possible. You are seen, you are heard, and then you are loved. And then people will buy from you because they trust you. Because with the growth content, you're putting yourself out there. With the total total addressable market content, you're reaching new people. And then with the authority led content. You're making your s making people know that you know your shit. And that's it. It is that simple. People are overcomplicating the entire process because they simply find a way to hate on LinkedIn. Which I know I get. Like LinkedIn is weird. You log in and you see your old boss, maybe your ex, in some sort of random post about a cat, and you're like, what the fuck is this? But then if you look beyond that and you see the potential, and you see that LinkedIn right now is a blue ocean for anyone that actually tries for at least a month and then delegates it to it to their team, it's gonna change their lives. Um, last last night I was looking at this new thing that we're putting forward. It's like thought leader ads. They're crazy good right now. LinkedIn has realized that it is not going to become the social media platform. It's trying to, goes back and forth. It has it's like a toxic ex relationship, but they want to be a social media platform and they push video, then they take it out. Now, because they they have you know investors in the platform, they need to monetize. So thought leader ads, they look like a normal post. It's got like a tiny bit where you can see it's an ad, but it looks like a general normal post. And what people are doing, they're posting these lead magnets that you see on YouTube all the time, you know, like the Maroboard breakdowns. They're taking them onto LinkedIn, then putting them organically for a week, you know, they get that massive push in virality at the start. Because by the way, these generate in manufacture virality at scale because they're like common common X to get Y. Engagement happens, you get put into a lot of different feeds for free. Again, free. And then people then are investing into these ads and doubling down. And then a post from six months ago just showed up to my on my feed last night. I'm interested because the post was good. So obviously the the graphic was good, the content was good, the hook was good, it's optimist. Like LinkedIn right now is going through a Facebook 2015 moment for the second time, and people are not paying attention.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

I think well, I I don't think I know I agree that LinkedIn is the single best platform that an agency owner could be on to get clients. Um I funny enough, speaking to a guy this afternoon, good friend, name's Ollie, has an agency called Saurbus, they do almost a they do almost a million a month, um, for anyone that doesn't know. And the main top of file is LinkedIn, and it's Oli's brand. And Ollie's the educator, by the way, not the storyteller. Ollie has no interest in being famous. I'm sure if he had it his way, he wouldn't be posting LinkedIn content at all. Would rather sit behind, stay in ops, do his thing. But he's the chosen one in that business. People resonate with his brand, he knows that, and he's putting out that value. But the lead magnet strategy is the number one way, the number thing that they are doing to get leads into the funnel and then convert people through various other systems. So I couldn't agree more. When someone's just starting, and by just starting I mean say they're at, you know, even 10k a month, you're you haven't got much knowledge, and I'm sure you can put yourself back in those shoes because when you had your first vol viral post, you weren't yet the successful woman financially that you are today, right? Uh and therefore have this depth of business experience. How does someone figure out what to talk about when they don't think they've got any value they can provide to the world?

SPEAKER_01 47:17

You become your own best case study. You do everything you can to become that client that you want to either serve or help. So most people struggle, and I I help a lot of ghostwriters and agency owners at the start and they're like, I don't have any testimonials or I have NDAs that I can't do, which is annoying, especially on LinkedIn. And I get it. You become that value. You become that person that you're trying to help. So if you're selling agency growth, like you just showcase how your agency is growing and what the things that you're doing are. Like the idea is you just help someone two steps behind you, and that's it. And if you if you can storytell through you, people are more likely to join you because people want something to believe in. And if they can trust you through your stories, and then they can they can then make a logical decision to buy with your education you're in. Right? People buy not with logic, they buy with emotion, and then they justify it with logic. When you understand that, you can then leverage your storytelling, whether it's I just signed my first client, here's exactly how I did it, to I just wrote a viral LinkedIn post, here's exactly how I did it. I just made this client ad go viral on Facebook. Here's exactly how I did it. When you're just simply explaining from a how I angle and not a how-to angle, you're gonna win. Right now, and this is something I say like, don't do how to, do how I, because that makes you more relatable. Because you're not talking from a point of like, I'm the most experienced person in the room, I'm gonna, you know, start preaching. No, you're just saying, I did this, it kind of worked, you can try it. If not, doesn't bother me. It's free. What are you gonna do about it? And if it works, then guess what? That client is gonna come back to you. And um, the moment I realized was when I signed my first whale client, I'll never forget it. He's actually flying me to the US uh three years after I signed him. Um I don't know how I landed him, he's a massive guy in the US, real estate legend inbound. I posted a carousel teaching people how to go violent things. Like, I want you, like you're great. Implement that immediately. I didn't pitch it, he just came through one carousel that I made, just showcasing how I did something. Right? I remember it. So people it's called a LinkedIn playbook, you know, it's a carousel of eight eight pages. He didn't even get to the end of it. He's like, she knows what she's doing. And I think right now people are looking for competent people rather than the most out there people. People want charismatic personal run legends, like they want the person that's in the trenches right now that knows something that they don't, and that can implement it for them. That's it. That's how I made my first like $10,000 just by getting one client for free at the start. By the way, I'm a big proponent of free work. Like, there's so much controversy right now on free work, and people should be paid for okay, cool. If you wanna not have clients and car, fine, so fine. But I did a lot of free work at the start, got the testimonials, was able to talk about them, got the expertise that I didn't have, got to learn for free too, at their expense. Um then I signed more clients, they paid me, I learned a lot from them, as well from the business end, and then that's it. Talked about our own content, storytold. And over time, that gave me more experience. And that made me me. That made me interested, interesting to listen to because then people saw the story unfold. I get messages all the time from people that were there from the start, they're like, I was there when you had 5,000 followers. And I'm like, really? Why? And now they've seen their whole journey and they trust me because they saw it all happen, and I think that is incredibly powerful because you have all the receipts, and no one can tell you that you can't do it because you showed everyone that you could it.

SPEAKER_00 50:50

And that's the thing, I think what stops people is they compare themselves to someone like you, and they say, Well, she's already talking about LinkedIn, and she's at that level. What's the point in me talking about how I've gained my first thousand followers? It's that comparison that stops people, which is such flawed logic, because by that logic no one would ever start a business. Because why would I start an agency if there's already one doing a couple of million? But it's because a personal brand is so in your face and there's it's so easy to so easy to compare yourself to somebody else who's human and it's not as easy to compare yourself to an entity.

SPEAKER_01 51:23

I saw it more as an advantage. I was like, all of these old people are giving old outdated things. Let me get a piece of that pie. And I went ahead. I think it's important for entrepreneurs and anyone that has impossible syndrome to realize that every single disadvantage that you think you have, it's actually an unfair advantage. Like your desire to do something is not there by accident, it's there for a reason. But it it will only stay there for a period of time and then it will go to the next person. Uh there's this book, I forgot the name right now. But um basically it t tells a story about how the universe gives you ideas, like million-dollar ideas. But if you don't act on them, someone else is gonna get it and then they're gonna act on it and you're gonna be upset because you didn't do it. That happened to me with TikTok. Like every every single one of us wishes that we actually started doing these stupid little dances on TikTok and now we would have been like multi-millionaires uh because of like five-second video.

SPEAKER_00 52:17

I don't wish that I did that.

SPEAKER_01 52:18

Okay, I wish I did that, to be honest. Fine. Okay, Jordan. But you know what I mean. Yeah, I get you. Fine. And so you're like, okay, well, I already missed my chance here. Why am I gonna let myself do it again when I can see it so visively that that that that's it?

SPEAKER_00 52:40

Where do you think this goes? Hold that. Hold that. Because there's one tactical thing that I think we're missing. We're posting content, we're putting things out, people like the posts, but we're making slow progress early days, people are fighting against the Arm only getting 10 likes, and they're just still having to like get everything done every week. What is there anything that people can do to pour gasoline on the content that they've got? aka following other people, commenting on other people's posts, engaging with people, like what are the hacks that most people miss out?

SPEAKER_01 53:17

There's two things. You borrow authority. So if you know someone of value, so let's say you and me after this podcast, we take a photo, you put it there. I just did a podcast with Laracosta, where she broke down her entire blah blah blah blah on how she made a million dollars, whatever. Uh, that's borrowed authority. Now you've got me. And then after that, you take remove me out of the equation, and it's all you. It's all related to things that we like, how building a puzzle around was important, how then that led you to be able to invest in like this really cool business. And then that starts this fuel that people are waiting for, right? Okay, what about Lara? I don't know anyone. Okay, can you break down someone, like someone's landing page, use Alex Remus as an example, break his landing page, people know him, then they trust him, they trust you as a as a result. They like your content, they're gonna follow you for that. Borrow authority as many times as you need to in order to get to get ahead. This is cheating, yes. Yes, it's not authentic, it's just not mean. That doesn't matter. Like if you want something, go get it. Like I I am so tired of um all of these excuses. That's one thing. Like borrow authority if you need to and if you want to. And that's that's a cheat code. That's what I did. The second one is find your own for advantage. Like, what about you is so interesting that people are going to resonate with immediately. Storytelling right now on LinkedIn is the most authentic thing that you can do, right? And so when you are authentically telling a story about how you transformed into the person that you are today, what that what's gonna happen? People are going to relate, right? Right now, people don't scroll on LinkedIn just to like a post and like buy from you. They they are scrolling on LinkedIn at work, trying to find some hope. Right? Most LinkedIn users, around 60 to 70%, scroll on mobile every single day. Most the highest peak times of LinkedIn usage is during work times. So, what does that indicate? People want some sort of escapism that's still professional and that relates to their current mindset. So, what is that? A transformation story, how they're they quit the 9 to 5, how they're working remotely, how they're making X amount of money on a side hustle. Give them a reason to attach that personality to yours. And then from that you can leverage it after. So this is why I'm so you know intent on the on this 4, 3, 2, 1 module, like four posts a week, three different types of content themes to like educate and storytelling and also sell. If you have something to sell, you don't you double down on the story of education? And after you repeat that for a decent amount of time, you'll then be able to understand, okay, this story worked. People relate to this, they don't relate to that, okay. I'll never talk about that again, and then that's it.

SPEAKER_00 55:46

Nice. You're gonna do it? Huh? Are you gonna do it? Oh, I don't know how many times have you tried to get me to do this. Uh I I need to I need to get that done. I need to sort out LinkedIn in my mass of juggling a thousand different things. But I will. I'm there. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm May I ask, what's stopping you?

SPEAKER_01 56:08

Uh time and if I was to remove control of the strategy.

SPEAKER_00 56:18

Control. I'm I'm I'm aware that on LinkedIn I would want to hold myself to the highest standard possible. When I create a YouTube video, I'm in full control of the content that goes out. The only thing I don't have control over is the editing, and of which I still micromanage that. So on LinkedIn. That content has to be if it's let's say it's written by someone else but is my story and is my is my truth, I still have to then go ahead and approve that, and I think that I hold it to such a high standard that I just haven't found the time to prioritise that yet.

SPEAKER_01 56:52

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00 56:53

Hmm. But it's coming.

SPEAKER_01 56:55

Is it is that really the reason?

SPEAKER_00 56:57

Yeah, I think it's that. I think it's like I want to I want to be able to the truth is I think I want to be able to do it myself, but I don't have the time nor desire to write the post myself. I I don't w it feels inauthentic having someone else write the content for me, because then it just feels like just anything.

SPEAKER_01 57:16

Is it because you don't know what to write about?

SPEAKER_00 57:19

No, we've got a lot of shit to talk about. I just don't want to sit down writing the post. And and maybe that's just like a decade of creating content. I'm like, do I really now want to jump into a new platform and start posting that? But I know I need to, because now being a co-founder of a B2B SaaS, LinkedIn is there there is no better platform in the world than LinkedIn for something like that. So it's coming.

SPEAKER_01 57:47

I just I just Yeah, I'm just trying to understand because I I just want to fix problems for people like yourself, because I I I know the struggle, but I also quite selfishly, and um I did this with one of my friends, Jody Cook, she's uh for this for 3030, and I literally had to go and fly to Spain, you know, 3,000 miles, to go shout at her to post on LinkedIn because I was like, You are the only woman I admire. Can you please create content for me? She ended up going viral in the next 24 hours, right? She's still posting to this day. The only reason why she's still posting is because we manufactured that that to happen for her. It was a very authority-led piece of content, it's AI based, and she's got an AI business. And so I just kind of want to find that for you. And like, what is it that can start and incentivize?

SPEAKER_00 58:35

You want to fix me?

SPEAKER_01 58:36

Yes, of course I want to fix you. So you can take me on the day.

SPEAKER_00 58:44

I need to figure it out. I need to f we can we can figure it out. We can go for dinner and we can figure it out.

SPEAKER_02 58:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 58:50

That's that's we can figure it out. But I need to I need to I need to figure it out because it's something I want to do.

SPEAKER_01 58:56

I I generally think it's not a time issue and I don't think it's something I think.

SPEAKER_00 58:59

What do you think it is?

SPEAKER_01 59:00

I think it's more so a the value attribution of how much the value that a simple LinkedIn post is gonna produce for you in the long term. I think that if I was able to manufacture that winning effect at the start, so like that viral push, right? And then you saw some sort of direct attribution to Lead Gen, whether that's email subscribers, you'd be more likely to keep on posting every single week and be more okay, be be okay with posting average content because the pieces that are outperforming the average content are better than you what what you expected. I think that that that personally.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

I think that's a fair observation. I think that I've had many years of a lot of success on YouTube and the idea of grinding it out without the immediate reward on a new platform is just I feel like I've I've earned the privilege to not have to go through that grind again, which is which is somewhat of an outrageous view, because it's very contradictory to to what I preach.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:05

Well, but it makes sense because why would you do something again when you're already at the top?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:09

Hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:13

But personally, I I think that you should be posting LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:18

Yeah, I mean I know I should be posting.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:20

Most likely, and I hope this I I really want to trigger you and I let you know that there's agency owners selling shit on LinkedIn, uh selling processes that don't work, uh being very inauthentic, uh, claiming claims that are not in at all realistic. And then there's you who has created massive change in the industry outside of LinkedIn. And um, I don't I don't know if you know this, but like most people on LinkedIn like don't know the YouTube world. They don't know the typical people that you and I follow. And so the advice that to you may feel like very generic. To them, it could change their life and could potentially become a you know consumer, YouTube subscriber, investor, whatever. And so when you see that, and when I see that, I'm like, my friend Jordan runs laps around these guys, but he's not here. And so these people are the big bosses, and then it's just ridiculous. So that triggers me. I hope it triggers you.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:12

Yeah, it triggers me on the internet. It triggers everyone in you. Yeah. I think I think I'm trying to figure out who what Jordan Plattin's identity is on LinkedIn. Because if I'm gonna do it properly and actually go for it, not just like one post because I got grilled by you and Bali, but actually like stick to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:29

But did it work? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:31

It worked, it did incredibly well. And then I had a couple of posts afterwards which did okay, but then I just was like, ah, this is just it's they didn't do okay, they flopped, really. And I think it's because I'm just not hitting it with the level of aggression that I want to be able to hit it with. I wanna I wanna be able to be polarising on LinkedIn, I think. And I because I think that's my I think I've got enough information to be polarising. But yeah, we'll figure it out. Back to you. Where do you think personal brand goes over the next five years considering the fact that we've already established authenticity isn't incredibly important, but I think there is a level I think I think there is a level to it. I think it's we are what we're really talking about is not just not being yourself at all, because I don't think you can maintain not being anything connected to your brand. But we're talking about creating a level above who we are, that's really what the personal brand is. It's like this this this this I suppose a facade that we've created. But in a world of AI where anyone can be anyone can talk about anything. Where does that leave us?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:44

Personal branding will still remain the single most important asset that any entrepreneur or aspiring person can have. Because it is not a fight of us and AI. It's a fight between us that can use AI and those that can't. If you are able to build a good personal brand with a significant amount of authority and some value to give and good testimonials and credibility, and you leverage AI for your business to automate it, to scale it, to do whatever it is that you want to do with AI, you're going to again run laps around people that are either stuck in the trenches or building a buzzer brand to a mid-level in building a business without AI because some people have this idea that AI is bad and we shouldn't use it. AI is simply here, in my opinion, right now, as it is, I don't know, maybe in five years or changing, we'll be ruled by robots. But for now, it is an amplifier of our current skills, especially in the world of entrepreneurship and building a personal brand. Having a good personal brand that has an identity and this storyline to it makes you unique in the market because you're able to do the thing that AI is not able to replicate yet. Storytell, be engaging, be relatable, right? Yes, we may be writing our YouTube scripts with some AI, but the stories are still real. Like no one can talk about like AI cannot talk about the story of me meeting you after a year after I tried to call the outreach to you, shouting to you about LinkedIn, and then we met in Bali because of Darren's podcast, and that's a cool story to tell. AI can't generate that.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:29

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:30

People love that, and so it is but we can use AI to then write that story even better, make it more punchy, concise, uh, better, you know, add some good open loops if we want to create a podcast about it, whatever. But the more experiences you have, the more interesting you become, the more power you have as an entrepreneur, and the more source and energy and whatever you want to call it, slay, your personal run bright personal round will have. It is all about you and your unique traits that make you so unique. Like the time that you filmed that video about the AI apocalypse and you were like running out of breath, running from the stairs, like sweating in Bali. Like AI can't do that.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:18

Maybe it can't do that, yes, of course, but it's you.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:24

So to distill that, it's what's gonna become because knowledge is gonna become baseline. So it's personality, association, and story, really.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:35

It is back to understanding to its psychological level. How do you become the most relevant person in the room, or the most likable, or the most charismatic? What experiences can you share with someone that will make you instantly likable? That is also the art of personal branding. Personal branding forces you to dive deep into these things. I again back to what we said, like personal branding is literally a self-improvement journey where you're forced to reflect on who you are every single day so you can improve your content and then you improve yourself. I had this realization a year ago that I could not speak for shit. Like I had social anxiety to the maximum because I was stuck at home grinding it out for two, like two years straight. Like at university, I made it a promise that I wouldn't go to any single party. I made no friends at uni. No one knows me at uni, by the way. Like, if someone asked for my for me, they would be like, who is that girl? Because I literally just grinded it out. But then I lost the social skill set of talking to a stranger. How embarrassing is that? And then I realized, okay, well, I can't do business in real life. I was socially anxious. I became an introvert as a result of entrepreneurship. Fine, cool. Could I cry? I could I cried about it, yeah. Then I took action on it. And then I learned the second biggest and most important thing that an entrepreneur can have is that, and that is like social skills. How can you talk to someone? How can you make them feel something? People don't remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel. And that is so important. Nay, I can't do that. And so the future of personal branding, still the ultimate key to success. And if you know how to use AI, you're gonna win this game.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:14

I see it as like the ultimate security. It's like every you will never, ever, ever. I won't I know that I will never I could lose every business that I've got, every team member, every bit of money in the bank, every asset that I own. And if I still have my personal brand, I will never be broke ever again. Unless I did something so wrong that screwed over my audience so much, which would never happen. So it's like the ultimate security in life. It's a just an opportunity magnet, and that's why I think it's so important.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:42

I agree. So, wait, one question for you. What's your tip for building a personal brand?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:46

What is my tip whilst the timer is on zero? What is my tip for starting a personal be authentic? Um But I am conscious of time and I wish we had another hour right now because I want to get into so much more with you, so which means we're gonna have to to to do an episode two, which is which is a shame.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:04

Start before or after dinner.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:06

Um Laura, what is what is what is next for you? What are you working on right now? Where are you going?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:13

So uh I'm excited that I finally have something to say because usually I can't, I don't say anything because I don't know. But um building this B2B SaaS and it's all about LinkedIn and solving this specific problem. That's why I was asking you so many questions, because I really want to understand what's making people like you, with the amount of success that you have and the amount of information, what what is the gap that I can fill? And like I was saying to you earlier, Coffee, it is not about the writing, otherwise you would let ChatGPT write your content. You've got a Lara AI that I made for you with all my templates and all my systems, but the reason why you're not using it is something else. And I am ever for like the last two months, we've like been in the process of understanding what that is, and it's not the writing, and it's also not the ideas, it's something else. So creating that and launching that B2B SaaS soon, hopefully, all about LinkedIn, fixing this exact same problem. But I think it is the logical aspect of strategy rather than the content, and then a LinkedIn ads agency coming soon. Amazing TBC.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:12

Pleasure, as always.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:13

Thanks for having me.